Jewish and Christian Cosmogony in Late Antiquity

The authors of this collection of essays explore different ways that ancient Jews and Christians understood the world’s creation and how this understanding shaped their world. In this volume discussions of cosmogony are not only placed within the contexts of biblical hermeneutics and the politics of interpretation, but more broadly within the diverse realms of ancient life. The authors demonstrate how beliefs about Creation played an important role in constructing rituals, pedagogy, ethics, geography, and anthropology. A biblically-based tradition shared by Jews and Christians, the Creation story serves as a fruitful point of departure for this collection of studies about these communities, their interactions, and their overlapping and competing conceptions of the world.

Lance Jenott and Sarit Kattan Gribetz: Introduction I. Scripture and Interpretation James C. VanderKam: Made to Order: Creation in Jubilees – Yair Furstenberg: The Rabbinic Ban on Ma’aseh Bereshit: Sources, Contexts and Concerns – Geoffrey Smith: ‘When the totality went about searching…’: Cosmogony and the Johanine Prologue in the Gospel of Truth – Tuomas Rasimus: The Archangel Michael in Ophite Creation Mythology II. Theology and Anthropology Maren R. Niehoff: The Emergence of Monotheistic Creation Theology in Hellenistic Judaism – Christian Wildberg: The Genesis of a Genesis: Corpus Hermeticum, Tractate III – Gwynn Kessler: Constant Creation: (Pro)creation in Palestinian Rabbinic Midrashim III. Pedagogy and Ethics Richard A. Layton: Moses the Pedagogue: Procopius, Philo, and Didymus on the Pedagogy of the Creation Account – Alex Kocar: ‘Humanity came to be according to three essential types…’ Ethical Responsibility and Practice in the Valentinian Anthropogony of the Tripartite Tractate (NHC I, 5) – Lance Jenott: Recovering Adam’s Lost Glory: Nag Hammadi Codex II in its Egyptian Monastic Environment IV. Space and Ritual Naomi Koltun-Fromm: Rock over Water: Pre-Historic Rocks and Primordial Waters from Creation to Salvation in Jerusalem – Ophir Münz-Manor: The Ritualization of Creation in Jewish and Christian Liturgical Texts from Late Antiquity – Mika Ahuvia: Darkness Upon the Abyss: Depicting Cosmogony in Late Antiquity